wow! Elvis really was The King!

On Elvis' lack of songwriting; back then that was the norm(kinda the way it's become since the 80's with pop singers anyway). The vast majority of singers, popular and the new rock and roll sang other people's material written for them by various "Tin Pan Alleys", where they just adapted their writing to a different beat. Guys like Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly were very much the outliers, though the folk singer end had much more of a history of it. Even when the aforementioned Beatles were auditioning for various labels with feck all success* them mentioning they wrote their own stuff was seen as "ahh bless, isn't that's nice, can you shut up and give us some proper songs please".

The Rolling Stones weren't too sure about writing their own material and came to it after they were signed, much of it because they saw and were encouraged by the Beatles into giving it a go. That the Stones without any real notions of songwriting beforehand hit the ground running and bloody fast(within months really) and bloody well with it has always impressed me.

That opened the floodgates and for the most part meant that the only artistes considered "authentic" were singer songwriters. That in of itself hurt Elvis and he was in the doldrums of cheesy Hollywood for most of the 1960's until his comeback concert where he showed he could still cut it in a big way. Sadly that led to Vegas and the trappings of rhinestone pantomime. He was a simple man, an actual working class boy with little by way of education, or support, with a huge talent. The British invasion guys on the other hand and for all their working class protestations(Lennon being a big one for this, the most middle class of the band) were for the most part middle class boys who had more to fall back on and room to manoeuvre.





*after being turned down by everyone they ended up being signed by what had become EMI's comedy record division Parlophone. Their producer was used to classical recordings or stuff like Peter Sellers and the Goons comedy records. Which actually turned out to be a wonderfully apt fit because he had the classical stuff and an ear for the unusual and experience in special effects on records.